I Didn’t Hyperventilate!

I gave what is officially my second presentation this week. I presented at the Triad SQL BI (Twitter | PASS) user group meeting and I didn’t hyperventilate! That’s a huge deal for someone like me, who is petrified of public speaking.

It started out a little rough though.

Timeline Friday, 8/22 (just 4 days before presentation date) – I met Katherine Fraser (SQLSassy) for lunch and she mentioned that their scheduled speaker had just cancelled on them the day before. I asked her what she was going to do and she said unless I wanted to present for her, she had no idea. I jokingly said, “Yeah, sure, I’ll present”. Do not EVER, tell a chapter lead you will present, even if joking around because they will pounce on you! Lesson learned there. I agreed to present a very introductory session on SSIS. I then went home and started to panic.

Saturday, 8/23 – I woke up with a horrible sinus headache and thought I was in the beginning of nasty sinus infection. Now I really started to panic. I sent Martin to the drugstore to buy every sinus medication they had on the shelf. There was no way I could be sick, I could not cancel on Katherine after I had just agreed to present the day before. I proceeded to pound down some Emergen-C and drink about a gallon of water an hour for the rest of the day.

Sunday, 8/24 – I woke up at 4:30 a.m. to take part in the upgrade of major system at work. I felt about the same as Saturday. I pounded some more Emergen-C and worked until 11:30am. After we got the green light from the testers at 3:30 p.m., I went to bed and collapsed.

Monday, 8/25 – Woke up feeling much better, but not great. Pounded more Emergen-C. Started to work on my presentation. Did I mention that I didn’t have anything prepped for a presentation? I’m not a speaker, why on earth would I have a presentation ready to go? Got a call from my boss that the system upgrade wasn’t going so smoothly and had to start firefighting in production.

Tuesday, 8/26 – Presentation day. Got the word from my boss that the system upgrade was still up in the air, but none of the pieces that were broken were anything I could help with or fix. I started to work on my presentation. Just before lunch time I was told I had two conference calls I needed to participate in. Great, another two hours I don’t get to work on my presentation! Finally done with conference calls, when I got a call from my boss, we are rolling back the upgrade and I need to bring the old server back online. Luckily I had been able to create the content of the presentation and test it. I just didn’t have any time to do a practice run through. That was going to have to be enough, it was time to go to Winston-Salem.

I arrived in plenty of time, but I forgot: the power supply for my laptop, my external mouse, speaker evaluation forms and my list of things I needed to take with me to the meeting. Luckily my laptop was fully charged and didn’t die during the presentation (in fact I could have gone on for another 2 ½ hours, thankfully no one wanted to stay that long!). A mouse was provided by our wonderful host, Matt Clepper of Inmar, but not before I had a slight mishap using that @!#$%^& embedded mouse on my laptop. Katherine was well prepared and brought speaker evaluation forms. As for my list of things I needed to bring with me, well, I just had to “adapt and overcome”.

The presentation went pretty well, I didn’t hyperventilate. Sometimes you have to have a very simple goal, just survive without a trip to the ER.

Wrap up Overall it was a good experience. I think I did a good job of presenting and the feedback I got reinforced that. There were some great ideas on what I could have done better and some great comments on what I did well.

Will I speak again? Probably. I’m not sure I’m ready for a SQL Saturday quite yet, but maybe another couple of times at UG meetings and I’ll think about it. A huge “Thank you” goes out to Katherine for taking a chance and believing in me.

Of course I didn’t sleep at all Tuesday night. I kept thinking, “I forgot to tell them…”

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[…] speaking on a semi-regular basis this year after many years of trepidation. You can read about my first speaking experience here. It’s three years later and I have discovered that I love speaking. I always wanted to be a […]